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July 02, 2012

Very idea of omniscient beings could be partial

At
the same time, as each new power evolves, it becomes easier for the recognition
of the essential Oneness of all existence, and thus, each new power gains new
capacities of insight, and breaks down the walls between the individual units
that lead a more or less fragmented and isolated existence due to the limitations
of their characteristic mode of consciousness, in the lower hemisphere of
Matter, Life and Mind.

This
process of intellectual conversion can happen both from “religion” to atheism and
from atheism to “religion” – just as it does from one “religion” to another.
Even if we grant that only one of these worldviews (whether atheism, a single
“religion”, or some specific combination) happens to be true, there are still
going to be many intelligent people who move away from it… The classical Jain tradition
encapsulated a view something like this in its doctrine of anekāntavāda (many-sidedness),
often expressed in the parable of the blind
men grasping the elephant… But then the positing of an omniscient being
doesn’t solve that problem – for we are not ourselves that being. The very idea
that there are omniscient beings could itself turn out to be partial,
superseded by a higher truth. What a recognition of partiality does is remind
us to doubt, to acknowledge uncertainty even as we try to grasp higher and less
partial truths – we just need to remember that we still need
to live and act even in the face of this doubt.

Young
adults, he thought, should be allowed to develop their capabilities in their
distinctive way. They should also delight in doing so as an end in itself. In
the higher education systems of today's world, this outlandish idea is almost
dead on its feet. It is nearly as alien as the notion that the purpose of
education is to serve the empire. Universities are no longer educational in any
sense of the word that Rousseau would have recognised. Instead, they have
become unabashed instruments of capital.

He
means Islam: "Demographic curves are very hard to bend," he says.
"Unless something changes in Europe in
the next century, it will eventually be a Muslim continent. Let me say it
diplomatically: Most religions are tribal to some degree.”

fascination
for violence in the saffron parivar seems to have reached its pinnacle with the
phenomenon of Hindutva terror. It has been more than a decade that this
phenomenon has raised its head which saw many avoidable deaths. Here we witness
activists, workers, Pracharaks of the ’cause’ collecting arms, storing
explosives, engaging themselves in arms

“For
example, many essays on Joyce’s Ulysses–and often the best ones
–were written by scholars who had not read the whole book; the same goes for
books on Kant or Hegel, where a truly detailed knowledge only gives rise to a
boring specialist exegesis, rather than living insights. The best
interpretations of Hegel are always partial: they extrapolate the totality from
a particular figure of thought or of dialectical movement. As a rule, it is not
a reading of a thick book by Hegel himself, but some striking, detailed
observation–often wrong or at least one-sided–made by an interpreter that
allows us to grasp Hegel’s thought in its living movement.” pg. 279-80 of Less
Than Nothing

Žižek’s bread-and-butter method, of course, is to
take some apparently simple phenomenon and subject it to a Hegelo-Lacanian
spiral of increasingly complicated ironic and counter-intuitive reversals. This
dazzles but sometimes tires me. Yet the moments when I like him best are those
apparently subordinate passages where he makes a more general point, sometimes
in a spirit of humor and sometimes in a spirit of humane general life wisdom.

Here’s
a great interview with Harman over at faslyncyc. In my
view, Graham is the great philosopher of lassen sein, letting be,
or what he calls “sincerity”. This is, for me, the essence of his ontology and
his practice. It is an ontology in resolute refusal of both judgment and
commodification; the anti-commidificationist/fetishist philosophy par
excellance. To preserve the singularity, the dignity of things and persons, is
the core of Harman’s thought. A beautiful vibration. This interview is a
testament to that.

This
Novel is extensively reviewed by Katherine Hayles in her latest book How We
Think/Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis - that itself, is arguably
the single best exploration of Digital Humanism, Techno-genesis, and Education
in the 21st century, and which we hope to provide some more information on
soon.

I’d
like to make two suggestions for areas in which this utopian impulse might live
on, two experiments, if you will: One from contemporary art, one from
contemporary radical politics. These two areas can be interestingly linked.
Indeed, if a tendency marks our time, then it is the increasing difficulty in
separating forms of collaborative art from experimental politics.